This invention relates to a crisis monitoring system. In particular, the invention relates to a system that judges whether a person is in trouble or not from his/her utterance.
Molesters frequent in confined public spaces. In order to avoid being molested in an elevator, for instance, a person should stand by the operation panel of the elevator, and if a suspicious-looking person gets on the elevator, be watchful of this person's behavior, so he/she can stop the elevator with the use of the operation panel and escape as soon as he/she senses harm from this person.
A crisis monitoring system has been proposed to deal with such situations (JP 2001-80833 A). According to this technique, an image pickup camera picks up an image of the interior of an elevator car, an image identifying unit identifies the image picked up by the camera, and a car interior state identifying unit identifies a state in the elevator car. An anomaly judging unit judges, from results provided by the image identifying unit and the car interior state identifying unit, whether there is a disturbance in the elevator car or not. When a disturbance is detected, an anomaly judging unit notifies the caretaker office of the building of the disturbance.
Another technique that has been proposed obtains an acoustic wave issued from a preselected monitoring object as an acoustic signal, which is analyzed by an acoustic analyzing module of a sound recognition unit (JP 2002-133558 A). The results of the analysis are processed by a signal analyzing module to obtain analysis information on the target. When the obtained analysis information exceeds a given level, image signals and acoustic signals of the living quarters being recorded for monitoring are sent over the Internet to a monitoring device, which is set up in a remote place from the monitored space to play images and sounds of the monitored space.
Still another related technique is a break-in notifying system in which sensors placed on doors to and from a house, steps of a staircase in the house, a carpet on the floor, and the like sense an intruder and transmit radio waves to a server (or a phone) in the house to notify the server of the break-in (JP 2004-48164 A). Receiving the radio waves, the server sends a break-in notification to a predetermined address via a communication line. The break-in notifying system enables a user away from his/her home to know of a break-in and to deal with it promptly.